Google Authorship Still Not Working
9SHARESFacebookTwitter I’ve been trying to setup Google Authorship on my websites and yet it seems I’ve failed to do so. Instead of the nice picture of my head next to my pages’ URLs I am only getting my name appear with a link to my Google+ page. Please see the “by Jonathan Jones” anchor text link in the following screenshot: As you can see there is no sight of my ugly mug anywhere in this search result, which is a little disheartening. So, I’ve looked into it and I’ve seen other cases that are similar to mine where only the “By [insert name here]” is showing up in the search results. It’s either a common problem or a lot of people are doing something wrong. The only thing I can point this to is the fact that the profile image I’m using is not up to scratch. However, my profile image does appear in the search results when returned with a result from Google+ itself, as you can see in the following image: Though through further testing it seems that it doesn’t matter what image you have when a result returns a Google+ post. I wouldn’t even say that is concrete evidence of the fact that you’re allowed to use any image when it comes to Google+, but in this instance that seems to be the case. Whether it’s because this is shared privately or because it’s my own account could play a part into why I’m seeing my image in these Google+ posts. When in fact for my website, in the case of the authorship snippet, it’s a little more complicated and does indeed require a clearer frontal shot of one’s face. This is something that I’ve adhered to and yet my face is nowhere to be seen! I’m currently doing some testing to see what the problem might actually be. I’ve changed my Google+ profile picture, as it seems that could be the only logical explanation as to why my picture isn’t showing up. I’m hopeful that this will do the trick and you’ll be seeing this in the search results: That’s actually the only decent picture that I could find. Hopefully that actually works. 🙂 Oh, and I thought I’d also drop in here my new years resolutions for 2014: I’d like to be a little more committed when updating my blogs. I do enjoy writing about my experiences whether that be about search engine optimisation or about life — on my life blog. I’ll be able to add give a little more attention to my web templates website, which I’ve neglected for sometime. And yet,...
Should You Pay Webmasters To Remove Links?
12SHARESFacebookTwitter Today’s discussion comes from a forum that I used to frequent called Admin-Talk. In the discussion, one webmaster stated that he charged those who spammed the comments section of his website to have those links removed later if they requested — likely helped by the fact their site had been penalised by Google. He stated that if they’ll pay people to spam his blog, then they’ll have to pay him to fix it by removing the links. And so I’d like to give my opinion on this. First and foremost, I’d like to address this by saying that these links that he is allowing to appear on his website could be affecting his website. If you have a ton of spammy links that have not been editorially cleared by a human being then that’s just asking for trouble. Google may penalise you and mistakenly identify your site as a link farm or as part of a network. Google have been cracking down on networks, and link farms — you certainly don’t want to get caught in the crossfire. Secondly, they don’t have to pay you anything. They can add your website to a disavow list. That just highlights the fact that you’re allowing any link to appear on your site and your site will either come under an algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty if you’re linking out to too many spammy webites. And hey, you might say that your site is still ranking well in Google, but why would you jeopardise this fact? I like to think of Google as a never ending minefield, and that you have to be extremely careful not to tread on any mines. Don’t let this be a mine that will blowup in your face. Thirdly, you’re extorting those who have made the mistake of hiring a cheap SEO service that has likely promised the poor business owner to rank them #1 in the search engine result pages for every keyword you can think of. It’s plain and simple extortion, which I believe most of the SEO world would say is unethical. The simple answer to this is no. You should not pay a dime to have your link removed from a certain website, and Google agrees with this. In a September 2013 video, John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google stated: But, essentially from our point of view when it comes to unnatural links to your website we want to see that you’ve taken significant steps to actually remove it from the web but if there are some links that you can’t remove yourself or there are some that require payment to be...
Did Rap Genius Fool Us All?
12SHARESFacebookTwitter If you type Rap Genius into Google you’ll find that Rap Genius is being mentioned quite a lot with their website being linked to on some very high authority websites including sites such as the LA Times, IB Times, Gawker, Billboard.com and a plethora of other sites linking to the either the homepage or apology blog post on RapGenius.com. I thought I’d put together a list of sites that are now linking to Rap Genius as a result of their de-listing on Google. Search Engine Land Billboard.com Gawker IB Times All Things D The Verge Tech Crunch Rolling Stone Spin.com LA Times Washington Post Mashable PC Magazine Huffington Post Tech Radar ABC News Wall Street Journal The Wire A lot of these sites have linked to RapGenius.com in the past, so the impact is likely to a lesser importance than new sites that have never linked to Rap Genius. For example, PC Mag, TechRadar, ABC News, and Search Engine Land are first timers when it comes to even mentioning Rap Genius — let alone linking to their website. This makes their links of higher value, as they are simply links that never existed on those sites before. Will these high authority sites benefit Rap Genius? Whilst these high authority links to Rap Genius won’t benefit rankings now, will they once Rap Genius are out of Google’s sandbox? It’s quite interesting as these are links that would not have been easy to get, but they now have these links because of this entire link scheme debacle. If irony could be described in the link building world, then this would be the perfect example of it. In fact, these links are worth more to the future of Rap Genius than the supposed “affiliate” or ‘Links for a Tweet’ scheme they employed — had they not been caught. It will be interesting to monitor their comeback once they’ve disavowed or contacted the bloggers they enrolled on this link building adventure of theirs. Why was Rap Genius Penalised? Why are links important for websites? An elaborate scheme that has played into the hands of Rap Genius The question remains, did Rap Genius fool us all? Did they plan this even bigger and more elaborate event of obtaining linkbacks to their own site? They sure did churn out that large apology letter (with annotations) on their own site rather quickly, which is where all these big sites have been linking. I also have to say bravo to John Marbach, who has now gained more links to his own site and exposure to his email service than he could have ever dreamed. I doubt John...
Matt Cutts: ‘Not necessary for every page to have a meta description’
21SHARESFacebookTwitter I’ve done a few meta tags in my time and I’m glad this has come up. I even created a specific way you’d be able to identify and make meta description updates to your site using Screaming Frog. In this video Matt Cutts has stated that he, even on his blog, doesn’t create meta description for all of his pages/posts. Instead he recommends allowing Google to automatically create a meta description by scraping data that is available on-page. However states that for the high ROI pages (or what I call “landing pages”) should have custom meta descriptions. The only warning that Google’s Head of Search Spam did give is the fact that you should not duplicate your meta descriptions. I would go ahead and say that you shouldn’t really duplicate anything. Whilst this was already known, there are in fact plugins for WordPress that do a much better job at automatically creating meta descriptions than Google. These are my two picks: Yoast SEO for WordPress SEO Ultimate for...
Google Penalises Rap Genius – Offsite SEO Gone Wrong
14SHARESFacebookTwitter On Christmas day, Google penalised a large US-based lyrics website and removed its presence from the SERPs. John Marbach, the guy that exposed Rap Genius wrote an article on his blog entitled “RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed” detailing how Rap Genius had improved its search rankings by enticing bloggers to add linkbacks to Rap Genius’ website that contained heavily targeted anchor text — in exchange for a Tweet to said page. (A link for a Tweet) This is what the search results look like when you search for “Rap Genius” at the moment: As you can see RapGenius.com can’t be seen other than on other websites mentioning the now penalised website. This is the sort of link building that RapGenius.com has been doing: That’s just asking for trouble. That’s 16 links to the same site with targeted keyword anchor text to specific pages on the RapGenius.com website. The reason they got caught? They weren’t careful enough. This sort of link building activity likely sent alarm bells ringing, and the fact that they were publicly exposed and publicly reaching out to bloggers like this on Facebook was just another nail in the coffin or even the final nail in the coffin. What’s the course of action? Rap Genius can definitely bounce back from this, as we’ve seen this sort of penalty with brands like Interflora and BMW. They need to contact all of the sites that they’ve reached out to delete the linkbacks to RapGenius.com or either disavow them. Now Rap Genius’ entire backlink profile will be under scrutiny. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether they recover from this. I don’t see why they shouldn’t recover from this if they act quickly. Another point is the fact they’ve likely gained a lot of attraction, as major sites like TechCrunch are now linking to RapGenius.com, which should count for them when they get back on their feet. It’s really quite interesting how a negative can also be a positive. Obviously the negativity of this is at a much higher percentage, but sometimes you just have to look at the positives — even if minimal. Matt Cutt’s “When penguins attack” post on Twitter When penguins attack! Merry Christmas! pic.twitter.com/iEs9yKBVXC — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 25, 2013 What’s your take on...
Google gives preference to Google+ (Duh!)
10SHARESFacebookTwitter It appears that I’ve managed to get my authorship working, but just not on this site. I presume this is because Google are essentially trying to push their product, Google Plus. Unfortunately this is not what I was expecting, but nonetheless I’ll still take it. I posted yesterday on Twitter that I’d be looking into implementing authorship on two of my sites. Just setup Google Authorship on two of my sites — should have done that a while ago. Will be fun to see my face in the SERPs. #GooglePlus — Jonathan Jones (@Jonny_J_) December 20, 2013 I’ve done this by verifying my websites using emails that are connected to the domains I own to verify my authorship status. I’ve also added a much more suitable picture as I’ve read that Google are quite stringent on the types of pictures you can use. You obviously can’t use pictures of cats, dogs or anything else other than a human face; otherwise, that would give you the benefit of higher click-through rates (CTR). This is obviously something Google are against, and you should only really be having rich snippets on listings that you’ve actually written yourself. It’s quite unfortunate as I did already have Google Plus authorship setup (also known as “rich snippets”) — I believe in that occurrence, however, I didn’t have an image uploaded that Google would be willing to accept. It was a side shot of my head. From Google’s own words: “Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot” Otherwise, you’ll find that your mug might not ever appear in the results. You’ll likely get the following issue where your only your Google Plus account will be linked to with no image in sight. See “by Jonathan Jones“. (Only text; boo!) Where Google+ was given preference over my own site And, this is the part where Google+ was given preference over my own website. I actually don’t really think this to be the case, and would moreover conclude that this is due to Google+ being crawled then indexed quicker than my site. I’ve heard it could take a minimum of  a week to start seeing my lovely face in the search results — after implementing the rel=”author”, adding your site to G+ and verifying your website using the same domain as your content (not necessary). Why does Google’s Authorship for Google Plus matter? According to a case study by Catalyst Search Marketing, click-through rates (CTR) increased by 150% when the authorship image showed up on their listings. It’s also quite obvious that if you have an image next to a bunch of...
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